Profiles

Jane Blunschi graduated from the Program in Creative Writing and Translation in 2016
with an MFA in fiction. A native of south Louisiana, her work explores the intersection
of queerness and southern feminine identity, with a focus on the themes of adoption,
sobriety, and the influence of esoterica and celebrity on female body image. She is
the author of the collection Understand Me, Sugar from Yellow Flag Press, and the travel book, Love Tupelo, published in 2012 by Corvus Press. A 2014 Lambda Literary Fellow, Jane's short fiction
has appeared in Cactus Heart Literary Review, and received a nomination for a Pushcart Prize. She is currently at work on a collection
of creative nonfiction.

Sy Hoahwah is Yappituka Comanche and Southern Arapaho. He is a direct descendent of
Comanche orator and principal chief Ten Bears, and of the Arapaho leader, Little Raven.
Since graduating from the University of Arkansas, Sy has published two collections: Velroy and the Madischie Mafia andNight Cradle. His poetry explores the contemporary continuance of Comanche identity into the 21st
century, offering an ironic perspective on life in a cultural landscape haunted by
death and beauty, and on the fringe of mass capitalism and Pan-Indianism. His poems
are complex imagistic sets of surrealism, gang subculture, witchcraft, and ghost lore
fused in tight lyrical narratives or post-modern enjambments. Sy's poems have appeared
in Indiana Review, Florida Review, Shenandoah, and other journals. He has been a featured writer for the Poetry Foundation's Harriet and is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship.

News & Events

Writer's spotlight

For Isabel

Elizabeth Harris, TranslatorMFA Fiction/Translation Alum (1999/2000)

A metaphysical detective story about love and existence from the Italian master, Antonio
Tabucchi. When Tadeus sets out to find Isabel, his former love, he soon finds himself
on a metaphysical journey across the world, one that calls into question the meaning
of time and existence and the power of words.

The Smoke of Horses

Charles RaffertyMFA Poetry Alum (1990)

"One after another, always surprising, the transcendent short tales and meditations
in Charles Rafferty'sThe Smoke of Horsesare sometimes lyrical and ecstatic, sometimes funny and self-deprecating, sometimes
wistful, but always beautifully precise in their odd and individual depiction of our
very human everyday life. The narrator may compare himself to a grackle, the grackle's
song to a rusty gate, and the reader takes wing along with him. A pleasure to read."—Lydia Davis

The Next Place

Al MaginnesMFA Poetry Alum

The poems in The Next Place find the borders where lives intersect, where the sight of a former lover evokes memories
of a bruised Volvo...skin that smelled like burned oil. No matter who inhabits these
poems, and a large cast moves through them—Chet Baker, King Lear, Isaac Newton, various friends of the poet, both living and
dead—they inhabit a space where one world is always encroaching on the next. A boy contemplates
holding up a store with his father's gun, a student and teacher debate the ending
of a Raymond Carver story, a father sees in his adopted daughter "a story built to
parallel mine." Through their wide range of subject matter, the poems in The Next Place assert that, as fascinating as the surface of this world is, it is only the beginning
of what we need to understand.

The Legend of the Albino Farm

Steve YatesMFA Fiction Alum (1994)

The Legend of the Albino Farm is a horror story turned inside out. What if a thriving family were saddled with
an unshakable spook tale? And what if that lore cursed them with an unending whirlwind
of destruction from thrill seekers, partiers, bikers, and Goths? Hettienne Sheehy
is about to inherit this devouring legacy. Last child to bear a once golden name,
she is heiress to a sprawling farm in the Missouri Ozarks. During summer, childhood
idylls in the late 1940s, Hettienne has foreseen all this apocalyptic fury in frightening,
mystifying visions. Haunted by a whirling augury, by a hurtful spook tale, and by
a property that seems to doom all who would dare own it, in the end, Hettienne will
risk everything to save the family she truly loves.

Lucky You

Erika CarterMFA Fiction Alum (2012)

By turns funny, knowing and hauntingly sad, Lucky You is a study in damage and detachment, a fearless portrait of three women at a crucial
point in their lives. With startling exactitude and wickedly deadpan humor, it lays
bare the emotional core of its characters with surgical precision. The writing is
deft and controlled, as natural and unforced as breath--which makes it impossible
to look away.

The Fall of Lisa Bellow

Susan PeraboMFA Fiction Alum (1994)

Like Everything I Never Told You and Room, The Fall of Lisa Bellow is edgy and original, a hair-raising exploration of the ripple effects of an unthinkable
crime. It is a dark, beautifully rendered, and gripping novel about coping, about
coming-of-age, and about forgiveness. It is also a beautiful illustration of how one
family, broken by tragedy, finds healing.

Understand Me, Sugar

Jane BlunschiMFA Fiction Alum (2016)

Jane Blunschi doesn’t flinch in her storytelling, and the result is a collection of
searingly honest tales that lay bare a full-throated humanity. Her characters are
smart, funny, and gut-wrenchingly familiar. As Blunschi’s voice slips under the skin
of these people, and flows in their bloodstreams, the reader can’t help but think,
this could be me. –Lucy Jane Bledsoe, author of A Thin Bright Line and The Big Bang
Symphony

The Self-Styled No-Child

Cody WalkerMFA Poetry Alum (1995)

This second book of poems by Cody Walker offers an unlikely array of characters: Edward
Lear, Mitt Romney, Amy Clampitt, and Andy Kaufman share the stage. Walker himself
is ever-present, with his shrugs, his heartbreak, his "way-out rhymes": "I'd like
to write some lines about the snow, / but -- I dunno, / the snow seems so / fleeting:
/ a flock of gulls, late for a meeting." Full of comic interruptions and grave forecasts,
these poems surprise, delight, and terrify.

Following Disasters

Nancy McCabeMFA Fiction Alum (1989)

On her twenty-first birthday, Maggie Owen receives an unusual birthday gift: a house.
That same day, the house’s owner, her aunt, dies. For three years, Maggie has been
fleeing her childhood demons: the deaths of her parents, estrangement from her terminally-ill
aunt, and a betrayal by her best friend. But now her career on the road, following
natural disasters in temporary insurance claims offices, ends abruptly as Maggie returns
home to face her past. But why does the house hold a mysterious spell over her? Why
does she have the persistent feeling that her aunt is haunting her? Why did her aunt
lie to her about the circumstances of her parents’ deaths? Who is the ghost child
that may be hanging around the house? And what’s with the guy next door who seems
so hostile toward her? Following Disasters is tightly woven ghost story that raises questions about legacies and their influence
on our choices.

Waterlines

Alison PelegrinMFA Poetry Alum (2000)

Louisiana native Alison Pelegrin gives us poems that describe the terrible power of
nature even as they underscore the state’s beauty. The poet moves from the familiar
gaudy delights of life in New Orleans to immerse the reader in the vastly different
experience of living north of Lake Pontchartrain. In this fractured world, the Bogue
Falaya River becomes a highway paved with benedictions, psalms, and praise for ordinary
things, as Pelegrin searches the unfamiliar for an incarnation of home.

Six Memos for the New Millennium

Geoffrey Brock, TranslatorProfessor of Poetry and Translation

Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium is an investigation into the literary values that he wished to bequeath to future generations.
Calvino was to deliver these five "memos" (there was to be a sixth) at Harvard's Charles Eliot
Norton Lectures in 1985-86, but he died before doing so. The new translation, by Geoffrey
Brock, corrects old inaccuracies and burnishes the shining prose with which Calvino
delivered his literary legacy.

lore

Davis McCombsDirector, Associate Professor of Poetry

Drawn from the rich folk traditions of his native Mammoth Cave region in Kentucky
as well as the folklore of his adopted Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, the poems in Davis
McCombs's third collection exist along the fraught lines where nature and agriculture
collide or in those charged moments where modernity intrudes on an archaic world.
These poems celebrate out-of-the-way places, the lore of plants, wild animals and
their unknowable lives, and nearly forgotten ways of being and talking and doing.
Rendered in a language of great lexical juxtapositions, here are days of soil and
labor, nights lit only by firelight, and the beings, possibly not of this world, lured
like moths to its flames. McCombs, always a poet of place and of rootedness, writes
poems teetering between two locales, one familiar but achingly distant, one bewildering
but alluringly present.

Bardo or Not Bardo

J.T. Mahany, TranslatorMFA Translation Student

One of Volodine’s funniest books, Bardo or Not Bardo takes place in his universe of failed revolutions, radical shamanism, and off-kilter
nomenclature. In each of these seven vignettes, someone dies and has to make his way
through the Tibetan afterlife, also known as the Bardo, where souls wander for forty-nine
days before being reborn with the help of the Book of the Dead. Unfortunately, Volodine’s characters bungle their chances at enlightenment: the
newly dead end up choosing to waste away their afterlife sleeping or to be reborn
as an insignificant spider. The living aren’t much better off and make a mess of things
in their own way, to the point of mistaking a Tibetan cookbook for the holy book.

Things Like the Truth

Ellen GilchristProfessor, Fiction

Things like the Truth brings together for the first time essays by Ellen Gilchrist on her later life and
family. Essays such as “The Joy of Swimming” reveal how Gilchrist, as an aging person,
thinks about the joys one can discover late in life. Other essays focus on surgery,
money, childhood memories, changing perspectives, and the vagaries of the age. Gilchrist
pays special attention to her evolving relationships with her adult children and the
pleasures and pitfalls of being a grandmother and great-grandmother. The volume also
includes essays from her diary about the sense of place in her mountain home near
her work at the University of Arkansas and about life after Hurricane Katrina on the
Mississippi Gulf Coast, her second residence.

I Don't Like Where This is Going

John DufresneMFA Fiction Alum (1984)

John Dufresne has been hailed by the New York Times as “an original talent . . . [whose] humor is frightfully dark, but . . . dazzling.” I Don’t Like Where This Is Going continues the misadventures of therapist-on-the-run Wylie “Coyote” Melville. Wylie
has witnessed a woman falling to her death outside the Luxor Hotel. Troubled by the
ensuing cover-up, he becomes a man on a mission, enlisting the help of his old friend,
an ace card player and master magician, to help find answers. The duo’s escapades
range from poker tables to desert highways, from bordellos to child beauty pageants,
resulting in a thoroughly satisfying and hilarious whodunit.

Holding Everything Down

William NotterMFA Poetry Alum (2002)

“At once humorous, lyrical, dramatic, and reflective, the voice in these poems captures
the jostling freedoms of personality in cinematic terms. The intimate lies down alongside
the epic, the jocular shares the verdant field with the chthonic. Like all true works
of art, Notter’s poems are had—in the manner we experience dreams, theater, or movies—not simply read. This auspicious
first collection possesses originality and depth, attributes far rarer than talent
and skill.”—Ricardo Pau-Llosa, author of Parable Hunter and Man

Stranger

Adam ClayMFA Poetry Alum (2005)

Stranger is a book of great change and deep roots, of the most rich elements of the earth
and the instability of a darkening sky. This third collection of poems by Adam Clay
dives into a dynamic world where the only map available is ”not of the world / but
of the path I took to arrive in this place, / a map with no real definable future
purpose." Tracing a period of great change in his life—a move, a new job, the birth
of his first child—Clay navigates with elegance and wonder, staring into the heart
of transition and finding in it wisdom.

Battle Sleep

Shannon Tate JonasMFA Poetry Alum (2005)

In his stunning first collection Battle Sleep Shannon Jonas’s poems cast such deep spells that their abiding voicings go under
as well, as if poetry were also beneath the surfaces, an interior face of change.
And the spells break, as they must, mid-lyric, again and again, for wounds, for losses
and betrayals and exiles so willingly heard out that distance becomes a welcome medium.
Frank Stanford summoned not from literary consensus but from a living consciousness.
The dead and the alive, not drowning. And forgiveness as boundary crosser unto perpetuity.
There is searing consolation here, the sort that returns trust to poetry.—William
Olsen, author of Avenue of Vanishing

The Absence of Knowing

Matthew HenriksenMFA Poetry Alum (2005)

In Henriken’s stirring follow-up to his debut, Ordinary Sun, he writes with an uninhibited resolve to explore intimate, everyday struggles and
capture their reality in amber. Brokenness, anger, and the light of innocence power
the poems of The Absence of Knowing. Meanwhile, a new beginning is captured in raw, smoldering, and cathartic expression,
leaving an aftermath of aria despite discordant events.

Why They Run the Way They Do

Susan PeraboMFA Fiction Alum (1994)

In Why They Run the Way They Do, critically acclaimed author Susan Perabo illustrates the triumphs and tragedies
of daily life. Perfectly distilled into moments of sharp humor and poignancy, her
latest collection features ordinary people in sometimes extraordinary circumstances.
Two young students try their hand at blackmail upon learning an illicit secret; a
woman grapples with feelings of betrayal after discovering her spinster sister’s pregnancy
test; the ghost of a couple’s past comes back to haunt them in the form of their toddler’s
stuffed toy.

Small Mothers of Fright

Tara BrayMFA Poetry Alum (2003)

In Small Mothers of Fright, Tara Bray draws on her experiences as a mother struggling to strike a balance between
protecting her daughter from the world’s perils and dazzling her with its many wonders.
The birds that fill these pages convey a sense of fragility and uncertainty, while
the rhythm of the seasons provides a comfort that promises the old will be made new
again. In a precise yet accessible style, Bray writes about fleeting actions and thoughts
that, in sum, create the memorable, lasting moments of life.

Stork Mountain

Miroslav PenkovMFA Fiction Alum (2009)

In Stork Mountain, a young Bulgarian immigrant returns to the country of his birth in search of his
grandfather, who suddenly and unexpectedly cut off all contact with the family three
years ago. The trail leads him to a village on the border with Turkey, a stone's throw
away from Greece, high up in the Strandja Mountains − a place of pagan mysteries and
black storks nesting in giant oaks; a place where every spring, possessed by Christian
saints, men and women dance barefoot across live coals in search of rebirth. Here
in the mountains, he gets drawn by his grandfather into a maze of half-truths. And
here, he falls in love with an unobtainable Muslim girl. Old ghosts come back to life
and forgotten conflicts blaze anew until the past surrenders its shameful secrets.

Cabinet of Curiosities

Gordon GriceMFA Poetry Alum (1993)

Cabinet of Curiosities is a lavishly illustrated introduction to the wonders of natural history and the
joys of being an amateur scientist and collector. Nature writer Gordon Grice, who started his first cabinet of curiosities at age six
when he found a skunk’s skull, explains how scientists classify all living things
through the Linnaeus system; how to tell real gold from fool’s gold; how to preserve
butterflies, crab shells, feathers, a robin’s egg, spider specimens, and honeycombs;
how to identify seashells; the difference between antlers and horns; how to read animal
tracks. And then, what to do with your specimens, including how to build a cabinet
of curiosities out of common household objects, like a desk organizer or a box for
fishing tackle.

Underwater Panther

Angie MacriMFA Poetry Alum (1996)

Winner of the Cowles Poetry Book Prize

“In lush lines dense with imagery, Underwater Panther offers a journey through Little Egypt, a section of southern Illinois, as seen through
the eyes of an inquisitive “dark-eyed girl.” There is elegy here for the “fathers
who never seem to speak” and the mothers always trying to spare their children from
inevitable suffering. There is elegy, too, for the land itself as the speaker acknowledges
that the power held in the land, in the coal and in the river’s currents, like the
myth of the underwater panther, might be contained, but never tamed.” —Sandy Longhorn, author of The Alchemy of My Mortal Form

Aftermath Lounge

Margaret McMullanMFA Fiction Alum (1989)

This novel in stories is a compelling tribute to the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Resurrecting
the place and its people alongside their heartaches and triumphs, Margaret McMullan
creates a riveting mosaic that feeds our wish to understand what it means to be alive
in this day and age.

Post-Exoticism in 10 Lessons, Lesson 11

J.T. Mahany, translatorMFA Translation Student

As with Antoine Volodine’s other works, Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven takes place in a corrupted future where a small group of radical writers—those who
practice “post-exoticism”—have been jailed by those in power and are slowly dying
off. But before Lutz Bassmann, the last post-exoticist writer, passes away, journalists
will try and pry out all the secrets of this powerful literary movement.

With its explanations of several key “post-exoticist” terms that appear in Volodine’s
other books, Lesson Eleven provides a crucial entryway into one of the most ambitious literary projects of recent
times: a project exploring the revolutionary power of literature. Translated from
the French by J.T. Mahany.

All the Wrong Places

Molly Giles Professor Emeritus, Fiction

Molly Giles’ nineteen strange, tightly woven tales merge the mythic and the modern
with dark humor and deep humanity. Many of the stories contain contemporary versions
of ancient guides: a ghost dog seen by a young drifter in love with a much older guru;
a wild goat on a cliff forever standing beside her dead ram glimpsed by a woman whose
husband battles cancer; a volcano goddess with a small dog appearing to a woman whose
boyfriend is flirting with her teenage daughter. The vacationland settings, Hawaii,
Ireland, Baja, and California among them, accentuate the characters’ sense of displacement.

Every Father's Daughter

Margaret McMullan, editor MFA Fiction Alum (1989)

What is it about the relationship between fathers and daughters that provokes so much
exquisite tenderness, satisfying communion, longing for more, idealization from both
ends, followed often if not inevitably by disappointment, hurt, and the need to understand
and forgive, or to finger the guilt of not understanding and loving enough? writes
Phillip Lopate, in his introduction to Every Father's Daughter, a collection of 24 personal essays by women writers writing about their fathers.
The editor, Margaret McMullan, is herself a distinguished novelist and educator.

The Alchemy of My Mortal Form

Sandy Longhorn MFA Poetry Alum (2003)

Winner of the 2014 Louise Bogen Award

"The Alchemy of My Mortal Form is fully imagined and richly worded, telling of a journey of body and soul through
fever and sin to redemption--in need of just enough to make my way. How wonderfully Sandy Longhorn surprises her reader."

Reconnaissance

Amy Nawrocki MFA Poetry Alum (2001)

In her latest collection, Amy Nawrocki plays voyeur and thief, surveying canvases
and investigating bookshelves, searching for creativity’s origins and exploring the
nature of inspiration. The poems in Reconnaissance uncover muses between the frayed pages of Byron and Shelley, in Chagall’s stained
glass, at Oscar Wilde’s grave, past the deep bogs of Glencoe, and in the far away
snow caps of Mount Fuji. In these insightful and elegant poems, Nawrocki invites us
to believe in “the authenticity of first sight.” Open the paint box and learn how
to stare.

Blush Less

Julia Paganelli MFA Poetry Student

“The poems in Julia Paganelli’s Blush Less are fueled by Appalachian shale and coal and the small town voices of waitresses
and miners working the late shift. These are poems about the simple truth of needing
to make ends meet. And yet as difficult as the circumstances are for the speakers
in these poems, Paganelli’s language works hard to transform what fuels them into
bursts of lyric intensity capable of transforming the most elemental ingredients of
that which powers even our ability to get by—a glass of milk, egg noodles, olive oil
on the counter top—into blessing, even into prayer.” —Joshua Robbins, author of Praise
Nothing

Voices Bright Flags

Geoffrey Brock Professor, Poetry and Translation

Voices Bright Flags is a series of experiments in what is sometimes called public poetry, where the author's
relationship with his country provides the main theme. The poems approach America
from a range of perspectives - political, historical, and personal - and in a range
of styles and voices, with each voice planting its own flag, as it were, implying
its own America. Together the poems form a partial mosaic, a discordant chorus, a
succession of conversations and quarrels between the author and the motley citizens
of his imagination.

The Ever After of Ashwin Rao

Padma Viswanathan Assistant Professor, Fiction

In 2004, almost 20 years after the fatal bombing of an Air India flight from Vancouver,
2 suspects--finally--are on trial for the crime. Ashwin Rao, an Indian psychologist
trained in Canada, comes back to do a "study of comparative grief," interviewing people
who lost loved one in the attack. What he neglects to mention is that he, too, had
family members who died on the plane. Then, to his delight and fear, he becomes embroiled
in the lives of one family caught in the undertow of the tragedy, and privy to their
secrets.

Tristano Dies

Elizabeth Harris, TranslatorMFA Fiction/Translation Alum (1999/2000)

Winner of the 2016 National Translation Award in Prose. It is a sultry August at the very end of the twentieth century, and Tristano is dying.
A hero of the Italian Resistance, Tristano has called a writer to his bedside to listen
to his life story, though, really, “you don’t tell a life…you live a life, and while
you’re living it, it’s already lost, has slipped away.” Tristano Dies, one of Antonio Tabucchi’s major novels, is a vibrant consideration of love, war,
devotion, betrayal, and the instability of the past, of storytelling, and what it
means to be a hero.

When Bad Things Happen to Rich People

Ian Morris MFA Fiction Alum (1991)

When Bad Things Happen to Rich People is a novel of social satire, a black comedy set in Chicago in the summer of 1995.
The novel’s protagonist, Nix Walters, is an adjunct instructor of English at a communications
college in the loop with few prospects for advancement. He had become a literary punch
line when his novel, touted as the next big literary phenomenon, was universally panned
by critics. He and his pregnant wife, Flora, are struggling financially; however,
their fortunes change when Nix is asked to ghostwrite the memoirs of publishing magnate
Zira Fontaine.

Dispensations

Randolph Thomas MFA Alum (1993)

Dispensations pitches teens and adults with drug and alcohol problems against aging and ill-prepared
parents. Thomas's characters test the boundaries of family responsibility. Blind to
each other's needs and feelings, they are haunted by visions of what their lives might
have been and might still be.

Revising the Storm

Geffrey Davis Assistant Professor, Poetry

This debut collection by Geffrey Davis burrows under the surface of gender, addiction,
recovery, clumsy love, bitterness, and faith. The tones explored—tender, comic, wry,
tragic—interrogate male subjectivity and privilege, as they examine their "embarrassed
desires" for familial connection, sexual love, compassion, and repair. Revising the
Storm also speaks to the sons and daughters affected by the drug/crack epidemic of
the '80s and addresses issues of masculinity and its importance in family.

From the Hilltop

Toni Jensen Assistant Professor, Fiction

For the characters we meet in Toni Jensen’s stories, the past is very much the present.
Theirs are American Indian lives off the reservation, lives lived beyond the usual
boundaries set for American Indian characters: migratory, often overlooked, yet carrying
tradition with them into a future of difference and possibility.

The Tulip-Flame

Chloe Honum MFA Poetry Alum (2010)

Chloe Honum's brilliant first book The Tulip-Flame traces an identity forming within radically divergent but interlocking systems: a
family traumatized by the mother's suicide, a failed relationship, the practice of
ballet, a garden— each strict, exacting. And with "a crow's sky-knowing mind," Honum
in every case transfigures emotion by way of elegant language and formal restraint.
Chloe Honum is "one astounding flame" of a poet, and I predict a long-lasting one.
--Claudia Emerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

Acts of God

Ellen Gilchrist Professor, Fiction

Master short story writer Ellen Gilchrist, winner of the National Book Award, returns
with her first story collection in over eight years. In "Acts of God," she has crafted
ten different scenarios in which people dealing with forces beyond their control somehow
manage to survive, persevere, and triumph, even if it is only a triumph of the will.

The Even Years of Marriage

Ash Bowen MFA Poetry Alum (2008)

Ash Bowen's debut poetry collection carries its readers from the bedroom to the heavens
in order to define what it means to be alive at this moment. The world seen in The Even Years of Marriage teems with promise while echoing strains of loss, with a constant awareness of personal
mythology and universal longing. Bowen's poems are home to an eerie intimacy where
desires mingle and clash, as in "The Last Known Love Letter of Poseidon," where the
speaker states, "My power can pull down any stubborn star / my finger chooses but
cannot draw you back.

This is the Garden by Guilio Mozzi

Mozzi’s work appeared in Best European Fiction 2010, edited by Aleksandar Hemon, and “The Apprentice,” a story from this remarkable collection,
was included in a collection of the best Italian stories of the twentieth century.
Harris’ translation of the Premio Modello winner is fluid and fluent and captures
Mozzi’s variety of tones in stories that are elliptical and compressed. The protagonist
in “The Apprentice” remains nameless, a laborer in a machine shop who is too conscientious
to seek a better position. In the opening story, “Cover Letter,” a purse-snatcher
returns letters he found in a victim’s purse, with a long précis on his motives and
methods.

East of the West

Miroslav Penkov MFA Fiction Alum (2009)

A grandson tries to buy Lenin’s corpse on eBay for his Communist grandfather. A failed
wunderkind steals a golden cross from an Orthodox church. Every five years, a boy
meets his cousin (the love of his life) in the river that divides their village into
east and west. These are Miroslav Penkov’s strange, unexpectedly moving visions of
his home country, Bulgaria, and they are the stories that make up this beguiling and
deeply felt debut. Animated by Penkov’s unmatched eye for the absurd, "East of the
West" is a brilliant portrait of a country with its own compass.

Giacomo's Seasons by Mario Rigoni Stern

Set in Asiago, in the pre-Alps of Italy’s Veneto region, this novel tells the story
of a mountain people who must adjust to life following the devastation of World War
I. The story follows the young protagonist Giacomo through seasons and years as he,
his family, and his entire community struggle to survive, salvaging scrap weaponry
from former battlefields in the hills around them. Some must leave their homes in
search of work abroad, splitting up families and threatening the mountain community
with slow disintegration. They must also adjust to the ominous growth of fascism and,
finally, face yet another war.

The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths

Sandy Longhorn MFA Poetry Alum (2003)

The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths is a stunning collection of poems. With her gift for startling images and precise
music, Sandy Longhorn converts the normally peaceful vision of the prairie into a
place that perpetually threatens to turn innocence into a cautionary tale. In these
poems, young girls discover haunting consequences for “refusing to mind.” Disobedience
transforms girls through underground language or the bright forgetfulness of poppies.
In this landscape formed by elegy and glaciers, everything worshiped is dead or wounded,
yet Longhorn’s imagination and lyricism resurrects these myths so you can “taste the
light his body had foretold.” — Traci Brimhall

The Greatest Show

Michael Downs MFA Fiction Alum (1999)

"Though each story stands alone in scope and power, the larger portrait of a community
bound and propelled by fate–specifically, a catastrophic circus fire–is a stellar,
magical achievement. The Greatest Show is a fantastically conceived, compelling book.” - Sabina Murray

The Realm of Last Chances

Steve Yarbrough MFA Fiction Alum (1985)

In a captivating departure from the Deep South setting of his previous fiction, Steve
Yarbrough now gives us a richly nuanced portrait of a marriage being reinvented in
a small town in the Northeast, in his most surprising and compelling novel yet.

Coney Island Pilgrims

John Hennessy MFA Poetry Alum (1996)

"In his new collection, Coney Island Pilgrims, John Hennessy does more than catalogue the things of this world; he sanctifies them:
bruised strawberries, Kangols, an unleashed pit bull, Puccini's Suor Angelica, rainy
afternoons, Big Bird. It's all here, reconstituted in language and forms that do more
than lodge a mirror before our mind's eye. These poems are the gateway to a kingdom
of rhythmic feeling, linguistic order, and imaginative explorations." —Major Jackson

Saturday Night at Magellan's

Charles Rafferty MFA Poetry Alum, 1990

Charles Rafferty works in miniatures. These short short stories explore the small
disasters of desire. They investigate the problems that ensue when, inevitably, his
characters get what they wish for and what they deserve.

A Raft of Grief

Chelsea Rathburn MFA Poetry Alum (2001)

In her excellent A Raft of Grief, Chelsea Rathburn probes the varieties and nuances of love and relationships with
unsparing lucidity. “Maybe it’s not the eye/but the mind that can take only so much
beauty, or solitude, or pleasure,/ maybe we travel both to find and forget ourselves,”
she says in this book set in places as varied as Paris, Florida, Krakow. I love how
she’s able to affirm what can happen between two people, while asking if a storyteller
sometimes has to “sacrifice lovers and selves to the narrative arc?” She’s willing
to, which is one reason why her narratives are so persuasive – her allegiance throughout
is to the poem as a whole. -Stephen Dunn

Some Kinds of Love: Stories

Steve Yates MFA Fiction Alum (1994)

Sometimes the opposite of love is not hate, but depravity. In these twelve stories
set in the Missouri Ozarks, New Orleans, and Mississippi, Steve Yates reveals lovers
clawing back from precipices of destructiveness, obsessiveness, cruelty, vanity, or
greed. They seek escape and yet find new barriers, realizing true love may not be
at all what they imagined. Pioneers, limestone quarry owners, young German American
Civil War survivors, bankers, sex toy catalog designers, highway engineers, Pakistani
terrorists, attorneys, missile guidance masterminds, and furniture factory workers
(who can see the future) populate these pieces.

Velroy and the Madischie Mafia

Sy Hoahwah MFA Poetry Alum (2007)

In southwestern Oklahoma an intricate sense of community exists in the small neighborhoods
of Comanche Tribal Housing like Madischie. From its streets comes a hell-bent young
crew of Comanche, Arapahoe, and Kiowa toughs led by a young Comanche named Velroy.
They seek power within a subculture of organized crime, caught in the century-long
transformation from the old Comanche Nation, "Lords of the Plains," to a modern-day
casino-owning tribe. This is their story, told in a distinctive narrative poetry with
its honed syntax, wild imagery, and a splash of high lyricism.

The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry: An Anthology

Geoffrey Brock Professor

A surprising and illuminating collection, The FSG Book of 20th-Century Italian Poetry invites the reader to examine the works of seventy-five Italian poets, in context
and conversation with one another. Edited by the poet and translator Geoffrey Brock,
these poems have been beautifully rendered into English by some of our finest English-language
poets, including Seamus Heaney, Robert Lowell, Ezra Pound, Paul Muldoon, and many
exciting younger voices.

In the Absence of Clocks

Jacob Shores-Arguello MFA Poetry Alum

In this fascinating collection, poet Jacob Shores-Arguello takes readers on an illuminating
voyage through Ukrainian life. Set during the turmoil of the 2004 Orange Revolution,
when the country trembled in the wake of political corruption and public outrage,
Shores-Arguello’s lyrics of a revolution provide a glimpse into a world at once foreign
and familiar.

Love, Tupelo

Jane V. Blunschi MFA Fiction Student

It's the perfect road trip for any fan of rich music, deep roots and real people.
That's what makes Tupelo shine and you won't miss a glimmer in this travel book about
one of America's best Southern getaways.

The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men

Adam Prince MFA Fiction Alum (2003)

Adam Prince’s highly-anticipated debut The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men is a seduction in its own right, a striptease that peels all the way down to the
soul. Men attempt to negotiate between their baroque imaginations and the realities
of their actual lives in a dark, comic, nuanced, sexed-up collection of stories that
might be offensive if it didn’t feel so true.

The Road to Happiness

Johnathon Williams MFA Poetry Alum (2010)

These poems are to Arkansas what Robert Frost’s poems are to New England…. Like Frost,
Williams explores a primal darkness and isolation, using the constraints of blank
verse and the sonnet to order the chaos of a difficult life and quiet what would otherwise
be unmanageable feelings. Ultimately, he shows us the frustration and clarity of vision
that come when one physically and emotionally stays put. - from the foreword by Katrina
Vandenberg

Into These Knots

Ashley Anna McHugh MFA Poetry Alum (2011)

The poems of Into These Knots, Ashley Anna McHugh's debut collection, glance from heaven to earth, from earth to
heaven, interrogating and elucidating in elegant and supercharged speech ultimate
questions and intimate foibles. With equal parts intelligence and passion, Ms. McHugh
can quarrel with scripture or riff on the amorous pleadings of Andrew Marvell or the
stark musings of Baudelaire. In "Cairns," a brilliant sequence that plays with the
boundaries of the sonnet, mountain hikes in rural West Virginia trace, among other
things, the difficult pathways to the divine.

Dying Light and Other Stories

Donald Hays, Professor Emeritus, Fiction

Donald Hays is the author of The Dixie Association (PEN/Faulkner nominee), The Hangman's Children (L.A. Times Book Review critics' choice), and Dying Light. He edited Stories: Contemporary Southern Short Fiction.

Safe From the Neighbors

Long, Last, Happy: New and Collected Stories

Nora Jane: A Life in Stories

Ellen Gilchrist Professor, Fiction

Ellen Gilchrist has published many books of fiction, two books of poetry, and a book
of essays. Her Collected Stories was published in the fall of 2000. Her many honors include the National Book Award
for Fiction.

Iron Shoes: A Novel

Molly Giles is the author of Creek Walkand Other Stories, Rough Translations, and Iron Shoes. Her honors include the Flannery O'Connor Award, two Pushcart Prizes, and an NEA
Fellowship.

“Giles's narrative is animated with zesty prose, whip-smart observations and a refreshing
roster of minor characters... It is a sparkling and witty account of one woman's belated
coming-of-age.” —Publishers Weekly

Dismal Rock

Davis McCombs, Associate Professor, University of Arkansas

Davis McCombs is the author of Ultima Thule (Yale Younger Poets Prize) and Dismal Rock (Dorset Prize). His awards include the Larry Levis Editors' Prize from The Missouri
Review, a Stegner Fellowship, and an NEA Fellowship.

“This beautiful book records the sacraments of labor and the dark equivocations of
history in a single swath of tobacco land in south central Kentucky. With infinite
patience and luminous particularity, Davis McCombs unearths the traces of those-who-have-gone-before-us
through the material world. His poems have the weight of psalms.” —Linda Gregerson,
judge

From Adam to Adam: Seven Old French Plays

translated by John DuVal Professor, University of Arkansas

John Duval's translations include Tales of Trilussa, Cesare Pascarella's The Discovery of America, and Fabliaux, Fair and Foul. His honors include the Raiziss/de Palchi Prize, the Harold Morton Landon Award,
and an NEA Fellowship.

The Wash

High Before Homeroom

Blood Almanac

Galveston

Nic Pizzolatto MFA Fiction Alum (2005)

On the same day that Roy Cady is diagnosed with a terminal illness, he senses that
his boss, a dangerous loan-sharking bar-owner, wants him dead. Known “without affection”
to members of the boss’s crew as “Big Country” on account of his long hair, beard,
and cowboy boots, Roy is alert to the possibility that a routine assignment could
be a deathtrap. Which it is. Yet what the would-be killers do to Roy Cady is not the
same as what he does to them, which is to say that after a smoking spasm of violence,
they are mostly dead and he is mostly alive.

The Odor of Sanctity

Michael Heffernan, Professor, University of Arkansas

Micheal Heffernan's many books include Love's Answer (Iowa Poetry Prize, 1993) and The Odor of Sanctity (2008). He has received three NEA fellowships, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Porter
Prize for an Arkansas writer.

“Michael Heffernan is a poet of very great, very casual power.” —Robert Wallace

Weighing Light

Geoffrey Brock Professor, Poetry and Translation

Geoffrey Brock is the author of Weighing Light (poems) and the translator of books by Cesare Pavese, Roberto Calasso, Umberto Eco,
and others. He has been a Stegner Fellow, an NEA Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow.